Firstly, it is my humble opinion that if you are seriously breaking the law and causing grief for other humans then not only do you deserve to be caught, but it is nigh impossible to maintain total anonymity once you have been targeted by powerful authorities. I am no security expert so take what you read here for what it is worth.

Why anonymity?
Anonymity is privacy. I close my curtains of an evening because I don't want people outside seeing what goes on inside. Just because I don't need my anonymity privacy today doesn't mean that I may not need it in 5 years. Once you give it away, it is not coming back. The future internet will be nothing like it is today. Corporate and government bodies dictate that it will become less anonymous and more controlled. In the same way that we should fight to retain our freedom of speech, we should fight to retain our right to privacy and a free internet as it was intended to be from the start. Some years ago, through a massive screw up of delivery personnel, I discovered that the national police were working together with a certain online business (equivalent of ebay) to prevent parallel importing. In doing so they legally had the right to read my emails. They delivered an item I sold to a friend of mine to whom I had only corresponded via email. Busted big time. They confessed and informed me that they were totally within their legal rights to do so.

If you think that national and international agencies are not spying upon the population then you are kidding yourself (think PRISM, XKeyscore and NASKEY). If you choose to do nothing about it, you are perpetuating the complacent attitude that will eventually see many of our basic rights slowly and unperceivably wrenched from our grasp. For good.

Total anonymity?
Personally I don't think this is possible (without keeping on the run) once you have been targeted. Below are some extreme but necessary pointers if you want to attempt to maintain total anonymity.

What NOT to do if you are a paranoid mess.

1) Don't use windows. Closed source proprietary code is an unknown. Since before 2000 windows was attempting backdoors (see NSAKEY). From memory I couldn't even setup windows 8 without connecting to the internet and associating my computer with an account.

2) Don't use your home internet connection.

3) Don't use public internet without precautionary steps (see below).

4) Don't use email to correspond.

5) Don't use popular social networking sites.

6) Don't use your cell phone.

7) Don't think you are smarter than the next guy.

Some things to DO if you are totally 'out there' noid.

1) Use a live operating system (as non root) on a read only media that doesn't mount existing internal drives. It should not use swap partitions, hibernate or sleep and it should not support booting from any other device except the one it was installed on. If you want persistent changes they should be saved on an encrypted file system. It should require a password to boot and clear ALL memory before shutdown.

2) On a public network spoof your MAC address and browser agent and stay away from security cameras. If you pay, pay in cash and try not to touch anything (public kiosks are a bacteria haven).

3) User burner phones, or burn your phones.

4) Use end to end encryption when chatting on any network.

5) If you must use email use temporary accounts such as 10minutemail or guerillamail. At least use an email service that scrubs headers.

6) Use a VPN, tor and anonymous socks proxies. If you pay, pay for it with bitcoins or some anonymous unsourcable online currency (or somebody else) and use a disposable email to join.

For the non crazy but slightly paranoid (me)

If that sounds like too much work then here are some tips to remain somewhat anonymous while using your home connection. The aim is to have my ISP, all sites I visit and my wife ignorant as to my online activities. I'm just joking about the wife. I want her ignorant to my offline stuff too. I want my IP Address to be anonymous and I want to be able to choose from which country I appear to be from so I can do things like stream the world cup live from websites restricted to the UK.

Pay for a VPN. It doesn't have to be quad loop VPN. For as little as $3 per month it can be well worth it. Many come with a nice GUI for every device you have. I use a non logging VPN from a tiny island outside of the US and EU that has a transparency report about all abuse claims and their reactions to said claims. They have a warrant canary which is a funny name for being transparent about request warrants, searches and seizures. They also have an alternative DNS. Here is my traffic route when I am in eNinja mode.

ME --> ISP --> VPN --> TOR --> VPN --> DESTINATION

My ISP (or network admin at work) sees my encrypted entry into a VPN only. Inside there I go through the tor network and exit on a chosen (and trusted non-logging) VPN node. I check for DNS leaks upon first log in.

Apart from adding an extra layer of security, it acts like a kill switch if the VPN connection is lost. Any file transfer in prorgess through software configured to use the proxy will not unexpectedly resume later while in an insecure environment.

Another layer of security would be to run the livedisk inside a virtual machine with all web traffic from the VM going through the PROXY/VPN.

I use a volatile pastebin service (burn on read) for messages and encrypt (end to end) any chat services which I very rarely use because some of my friends can't even spell encryption. At work I do the opposite to all that is written above. I find the privacy invading, totalitarian, cloud based services soooo useful that I swallow my pride and just connect. I know, I am two faced.

If anybody has other anonymity techniques to add then please do. If anyone wants some advice on how to start playing around with anonymity then feel free to ask. I would love to release a Porteus edition that fits in the 'I am totally fucking paranoid' category above. TAILS style.

How do i become super user?
Wear your underpants on the outside and put on a cape.

That's privacy not anonymity, if you leave the name at the front door.

Indeed. What I meant was that anonymity IS privacy, but privacy is not anonymity. I think privacy should be a fundamental right.

When do I need real anonymity?...I believe that the majority of us only need more privacy.

Agreed. Privacy is also relative so opinions may vary. It may be as simple as in the case where an ISP blocks or filters because they don't like file sharing apps. I use them all the time to download valid and legal content.

Thanks for the extra option.

How do i become super user?
Wear your underpants on the outside and put on a cape.

@brokenman:
How does the laymen or linux newcomer find his way into being able to follow all these instructions? Most are so accustomed to internet non-anonymously, they have crossed the border. It does not look that dangerous. They just quit trying to be anonymous! I realize that it might be too late for me.

Midori private browsing of elementary os works quite fine. Result:
Within our dataset of several million visitors, only one in 897,970 browsers have the same fingerprint as yours.

Elementary os reports the action of Midori private browsing action that:- doesn't store any personal data:
No history or web cookies are being saved.
Extensions are disabled.
HTML5 storage, local database and application caches are disabled.

- prevents websites from tracking the user:
Referrer URLs are stripped down to the hostname.
DNS prefetching is disabled.
The language and timezone are not revealed to websites.
Flash and other Netscape plugins cannot be listed by websites.

If you enable the "cookie manager" and the "Statusbar Features" you get some Tools
at the bottom-line which let you en-/disable picture download, javascript, flash,
change the user agent and zoom-factor on the fly.

Hit the F9 - key to get a useful sidepane to manage the cookies/downloads/history and bookmarks.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Privacy:
Paradoxically anti-fingerprinting and other privacy technologies can be
self-defeating if they are not used by a sufficient number of people.
read
If you're the only one with a secure setup,you are again unique and trackable.

I think Donald has a good point there. In some sense being anonymous means not being noticed. Blending in. Personally I want to have the same browser agent and configuration as 90% of users if possible. Any unique option or settings marks you as different. A good example is the link supplied. You do the test and find that you have a unique fingerprint from over 4 million of their visitors. They have just recorded your fingerprint into a database of over 4 million people (how sure can you really be that only anonymous info is collected) and marked you as unique and trackable.

How does the laymen or linux newcomer find his way into being able to follow all these instructions?

I guess the first thing is to read about it. The VPN options are really user friendly these days. They have a GUI that does the work for you. Once you have made the decision that you want some anonymity or privacy then read about how to do it. The second option is to get a pre rolled distro that has already setup most of the system for you. The people that follow and use your information rely on the complacency and the relaxed attitude of the majority. People are naturally complacent or ignorant of online privacy and I don't think this will change. If it is cheap/free and easy then people will adopt it. I don't think we can actually have absolute privacy but at least we can make it more expensive or time consuming for those that intend to track us.

To be honest, I think even most mainstream unix-like distros are wide open to intervention by government or state departments. With all the bug patches being served out this is quite obvious. It wouldn't be too difficult for a department/person to submit a bug 'fix' that in fact does something more than just fix the bug. Something that makes it easy for the writer to get access. We all rely on upstream core components (like openssl or gtk) so imagine if a department paid someone one million dollars to write a bugdoor for a core component like this. So to answer your question Francois, people have to educate themselves, or trust in a pre rolled distro that will try their best to do the job of anonymizing the end user.

How do i become super user?
Wear your underpants on the outside and put on a cape.

Thus the more persons try to use anonymous internet practice the better we will be. Big linux distributions should provide midori (firefox, chromium) anonymous browsing mode standard. Midori or the like should try to gain popularity with winose users. We should all get on VPN communication. We should close the internet connection of our winose and linus boxes as much as we can. And lets keep as much as possible paper and pencils.

Hi francois
No one is sitting in a dark room trying to break into your box!(except some
script-kiddies or hobby-cracker..lol).You are not a worthwhile goal.(imo)
But you will be on a automatic generated list because everyone is suspicious
these days.
(If you want to be sure to be on this list,search for "Tails" with google)..:wink:

The scariest thing is that I am within a NATed network. So I thought it would be quite safe as we are not exposed directly to the Internet which is a treacherous place. FYI I have not announce my IP and my external IP is dynamic. I have activated fail2ban ever since and so far have not seen another instance.

It is better to be safe than sorry.

Last but not least, checkout closely on the last hacker address. He seems to come out from the US Rocky Mountains. Is that the NSA???

On principle no mobile phone, but quiite a few sites requiring activation thru SMS. There is a plethora of sites offering help with anonymity. Some however turn out to be blacklisted, others have stale cell phone numbers, yet others work ok, but the SMS never gets posted, look like rip-offs to sell their private numbers.